The Riordan Brothers Build a Kingdom of Wood

By the eighteen nineties, the Riordan brothers had made themselves indispensable to Flagstaff. Michael and Timothy Riordan had arrived in northern Arizona in the wake of the railroad and seen what the railroad needed: lumber, and lots of it. They founded the Arizona Lumber and Timber Company and went to work on the ponderosa forest. They introduced electricity to Flagstaff to run the mill, making the town one of the earliest electrified communities in the territory. They established the first library in the city. They were involved in lumber, the railroad, cattle, banking, and territorial politics simultaneously.

In nineteen-four, the brothers built a house together. They had both married: Michael to Caroline Metz, Timothy to her sister Elizabeth. Two families, two wings, one compound. The architect was Charles Whittlesey, the same man who designed the El Tovar Hotel at the Grand Canyon. The result was a thirteen-thousand-square-foot structure of log planks, wood shingles, and native stone, two six-thousand-square-foot wings joined by a common room large enough to accommodate both families together. The design was influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement, every element referencing the forest that had paid for it.

The mansion still stands. Arizona State Parks acquired it in nineteen seventy-eight, and it opened to the public in nineteen eighty-three. Timothy's wing came first; Michael's opened for tours in two thousand and two. The interior is largely intact: original furniture, photographs, and objects from the territorial era preserved under climate control in the rooms where the family actually lived. The lumber that built Flagstaff built this house too, and this house outlasted the mill by nearly a century.